Met Éireann is collaborating with Denmark, Iceland and the Netherlands on a new supercomputer designed to advance short-term weather forecasting.
The new multimillion high-performance computer built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will also be used to advance climate science research as part of preparation for the impacts of climate change, Met Éireann says.
“With global temperatures projected to increase further over the next decades, weather patterns are expected to become more extreme and more challenging to forecast,”it says.
The new supercomputer will be operational by early 2023 under the project name “United Weather Centres-West”.
It will perform 4,000 trillion calculations per second and handle millions of weather observations every 24 hours - producing detailed weather forecasts every hour, which is especially critical ahead of severe weather.
It will be powered entirely by renewable Icelandic hydropower and geothermal energy, meaning running costs and the CO2 footprint will be kept to a minimum.
Met Éireann says it will provide high-resolution weather forecasts that will be used to provide more accurate and timely weather warnings, allowing emergency services to prepare for potential impacts of severe weather;
It will also provide “more timely and focused information” to marine communities, along with the agricultural and transport sectors, in relation to extreme weather events, it says.
The project involving Met Éireann, the Danish Meteorological Institute, the Icelandic Meteorological Office and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute is part of a broader collaboration between ten national weather centres in Europe.
The United Weather Centres group plans to operate a common multi-national weather forecasting system by the end of the decade.
Met Éireann director Eoin Moran said the UWC-West supercomputer is “the first step in a powerful collaboration between weather services in Europe which will allow Ireland to meet the growing challenge of forecasting high impact weather events with much greater confidence”.
“ Our countries have a long history of working together in weather prediction research. Denmark, The Netherlands, Iceland and Ireland bound the North East Atlantic Area and are now combining resources to best predict the weather that impacts this region,”Moran said.
“ This is particularly important in the context of the influence of climate change on the predictably of weather systems as the new supercomputer will allow for the incorporation of the most up to date weather forecasting methodologies,”he said.
